Pulse
View from a Thousand Feet
Clayton Cowl has combined his hobby with his profession to make hot air ballooning safer.
By Kim Kiser
“It was like levitating,” Clayton Cowl, M.D., says of the first time he went up in a hot air balloon. An internal medicine resident at the University of Iowa in Iowa City at the time, Cowl had completed ground school for flying aircraft, when he met a commercial balloon pilot who took him on a ride. “It was a magical sense of being able to have a panoramic 360-degree view of the world going by very slowly,” he says of that flight in the fall of 1992.
Cowl, who is chief of the Aviation and Aerospace Medicine Section at Mayo Clinic, went on to get his private balloon pilot rating and eventually his commercial rating from the Federal Aviation Administration. Today, he flies hot air balloons year-round, taking part in competitions in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and community events. One of the balloons he pilots is the Wells Fargo Bank balloon, an orange, gold, and white upside-down tear-drop-shaped vessel that’s the height of a seven-story building when inflated.
Cowl, who also flies fixed-wing aircraft, says piloting a balloon takes a different mindset. In a plane, he says, you know you can get from airport A to airport B and back in a certain amount of time. In a balloon, the wind determines your speed and direction. “With each flight, the wind will be a little bit different. Your speed can change, the wind can change,” he explains.
Flying a balloon also requires keen observation. “Balloonists tend to notice things like direction of the wind or things about the earth that other people in their busy lives don’t notice,” he says. “Flying helps you recognize things you otherwise might not be perceptive about.”
Cowl combined his vocation and avocation in the mid-1990s. Drawing on his background in epidemiology, he analyzed the records of 495 hot air balloon crashes recorded by the National Transportation Safety Board between 1964 and 1995 to figure out which factors were most responsible for injuries and fatalities. He found contact with power lines was the most significant predictor of a fatality. “It wasn’t just electrocution,” he says of the cause of the deaths. In most cases, contact with power lines caused the basket to overturn; in others, it severed the cables that attached the basket to the balloon, causing pilots and their passengers to fall to their deaths.
The resulting article, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998, prompted changes in the way balloons are made. Today, he says, nearly all balloon manufacturers use Kevlar cables, which are nonconductive, rather than steel ones. “It really changed the industry,” he says of his work.